Tag Archives: politics

It looks like the IR nut-jobs in the Coalition are refining their political strategy to keep working people down. Peter Reith has called for a broad-based inquiry into union behaviour and governance. The IR nut-jobs have clearly learned from the WorkChoices but it was clearly not the message that a majority of Australians were attempting to teach (you know the one about taking rights at work seriously). Instead, the idea is to use an inquiry of some description such as a Royal Commission to fundamentally weaken the independent organising capacity of the union movement. All with the added sweetener of ensuring complete corporate dominance of the hundreds of billions of dollars of workers’ capital in industry superannuation funds. Continue reading →

Now the ongoing travelling circus of US Presidential politics is taking a 5-minute coffee break, we can all go back to pondering the big questions again (that is until we get the latest news on whether 2016 will be a Clinton-Bush contest). For me that means thinking about the links between (a) the capitalist economy as we know it, (b) the operating of an increasingly authoritarian state/corporate security apparatus, and as such (c) strategies for resistance and renewal. Continue reading →

In the State of Victoria, local democracy is no longer local or particularly democratic. It is the plaything of soft-money politics and corporate control – where even the pretense of truly democratic values are no legally enshrined. It’s kind of like a Lilliputian version of America Votes 2012, where less charismatic versions of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama do battle but which ever candidate wins corporate control is victorious. And so voting closed on Friday October 26 2012 over an election campaign that history is likely to recycle again in four years. Continue reading →

It’s been raining all week in Melbourne. As summer’s heat is dampened, it’s easy to lose sight of all the good news about how people are fighting back against corporate power. Especially so because it goes largely unnoticed and unreported in the mainstream press. You might have missed it but something truly historic and monumental happened. On February 28, Indian workers across the entire nation staged the largest ever general strike – over 100 million workers stopped work, downed tools, and took to the streets. Continue reading →